I don’t think “for the time” is that relevant here. My major problem with it is how shallow it is. All 5 phases are so repetitive, with so little variations and so little to do.
The only good things about it were the editors, those were impressive, especially the creature editor. But it’s just cosmetic, mechanics are so poor almost nothing emerges from it. It’s quite disappointing for designers that have been major actors of the simulation genre forever.
Will Wright was still there for Spore, so everything he touched was not gold. It’s supposed to be a whole universe and it’s barely a simulation of anything, somehow he forgot to design a game around it.
And now he’s hopped on the Blockchain/NFT train…
Yeah, pretty much. The best Sims game doesn’t exist, it’s a Frankenstein monster that would take bits of the 4 games.
I love the idea of 3 with the open city and NPC progression, but wow this game’s an unstable glitchy mess. It’s not even close to be playable without many unofficial fixes, and even then, it runs like shit.
The only things I’d take from 4 would be maybe moods (nice to have, I guess) and the more organic body models, with more seemless morphs. 4’s gameplay is boring as hell, nothing interesting ever happens. And they got rid of create-a-style which is a huge creativity downgrade.
Oh, yeah, like there isn’t a truckload of perfect ports of games 1 or 2 gens past the PS2 on regular switch.
Tolkien estate usually doesn’t like their words used in random stuff. Sometimes I think they’re bordering on control freaks, but in that particular case, yeah, nuking that shit and forcing them to change their name wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me.
If they’re not aware of it, maybe someone should tip them.
I don’t know how it was when you were a kid, but there’s been a good number of pretty damning stories since then.
Especially the one about the fucking overt pedophile with the rabid “edgy” fanbase and Roblox having to be coerced into doing something.
Or the shady team-developed games, that are not being controlled in any way by Roblox, but where minor developers are being “recruited” and exploited by adults.
Or the way Roblox itself obfuscates how much you can profit from your games with absurd fees over fees over terrible fake money exchange rates. And how it encourages shitty monetization practices.
"See, on this diagram, that part of the global population represents the users we can legally identify, because they’re not minors.
_ So, who’s in the rest of the diagram?..
_ This is a mystery to everybody."
Like… The one with the werewolf? Really?
Well, that’s definitely one of the Sonic games of all times.
800 is a fucking crusade. 800 bastards pretending to be on the side of good and pillaging and raping your ass instead.
For that you’ll have the Ultimate™ Edition. It has about 30% of total content.
Life By You, published by Paradox was cancelled, for some undisclosed reason, not even to the developers themselves it seems. It was supposed to be close to release.
There are other life sim projects in progress (the indie Paralives I think is the one gathering attention right now).
Both screens were also just awful about blurring during fast movement. Nintendo wisely avoided it altogether,
While mostly true, they should have told Rare too. Between blurring and bad contrast, Donkey Kong Land was almost unplayable.
(By the way, screens with bad blurring from fast moving stuff were still a thing for a long time after that. Dracula X Chronicles for PSP had the original PC-Engine Rondo of Blood in it. Small, fast black bats on a bright background were almost perfectly invisible)
I’m pretty sure the gamegear lost that war because it couldn’t really be used as a handheld. Not with that battery life.
The game boy may have been a very limited system, but you could bring it with you and play Tetris for hours and hours… or for its second wind, show your pokémon to everyone at school.
Perhaps perplexity has privileged pipelines for perpetrating its pumping purposes.
Nothing like actual puzzles or (obviously) roadblocks, no. Basically by moving with the app you can scan your surroundings and, using a limited resource, plant flowers on your path. Along the way you level up seedlings and eventually pluck out new pikmins to accompany you, and you discover stuff around you (fruit, big sprouts).
You can then send your pikmins in expeditions to retrieve fruits. If you notice them after the fact, it means your Pikmin may have to travel from where you are now to get those, and come back to you. You can follow them on the map, It gets a bit crazy when you’ve traveled a few hundred kilometers in between. The type of Pikmin will help, colour compatible-ones will work faster, purple Pikmin are strong like a bunch of normal ones, pink are very fast if they’re the only type (since they can fly) etc.
The collaborative part is mostly around big sprouts (corresponding to landmarks like in other Niantic games, so real life monuments, parks, curiosities etc). You’re supposed to plant a lot of flowers in a radius around them to make the plant bloom and then everyone can send an expedition to the giant flower to get a bunch of resources.
It doesn’t have a lot of depth really, but it makes for fun interactions. Your Pikmin all come with their place of origin, and get decorations depending on stuff around that place (seashells on beaches, acorns and beetles in forests, lots of random junk for specific buildings, like stores, train stations, parks, restaurants,…), and the app also incorporates pictures you may have taken in those places to make a diary of sort.
I’ve played a bit more pikmin bloom than pokémon go (and I’ve stopped playing both), but avatars show player locations on the GPS-like map, related to each other and game elements. Sure they could be generic markers instead but it’d lose a bit of charm.
What I didn’t understand was why don’t those use the aesthetics of the universe they’re based on. Like, it’s Pikmin. At least let me put a fish bowl helmet and a space suit on my avatar.
That’s how meanings have shifted. Originally roguelite meant anything that borrows stuff from roguelikes while not playing like the original rogue.
Stuff like Nethack, Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup), Pixel Dungeon, ADOM, Mystery Dungeon,… were the true roguelikes. If you ask the purists, they’ll probably throw the freaking Berlin Interpretation at you.
The Binding of Isaac muddled the popular definition of roguelike (because frankly, it was not on the radar of many people before that).
Now everything using procedural generation and maybe a hint of permadeath gets to be called roguelike.
In the Pokémon universe? Happens like once a week.
A random kid will probably stop them by accident or something.
Well said. There is no way a “tipping” system set up by big publishers would end up in the creators’ pocket anyway.
Especially not if you include every small hand from programmer to artist to QA tester etc (and they should be included).
There are several projects trying to do their own life sim. One that was supposed to be published by Paradox was cancelled recently, shortly before planned release, and to the surprise of the dev team apparently.
This is not an easy genre to develop for, lots of things can go wrong and it might be hard to find a good balance between boring and unmanageable feature creep.
Even Cities Skyline devs had a headstart, they already had a successful transport sim before they tried to fill the smoking crater left by EA SimCity’s explosion.